Blurb

Looking for Lucie is a contemporary YA novel that explores identity, self-discovery, and newfound friendship as an 18-year-old girl sets out to uncover her ethnic heritage and family history.

“Where are you really from?”

It’s a question every brown girl in a white-washed town is familiar with, and one that Lucie has never been able to answer. All she knows is that her mother is white, she’s never met her father, and she looks nothing like the rest of her family. She can’t even talk about it because everyone says it shouldn’t matter!

Well, it matters to Lucie and-with her new friend Nav, who knows exactly who he is-she’s determined to find some answers.

What do you do when your entire existence is a question with no answer?

You do a DNA test.

Review

I really enjoyed this story. With themes of identity, family secrets, racism, blended family and cultural heritage, there is a lot to think about.

The impact of Lucie’s mum not telling her anything throughout her life about her biological father just leads to lots of questions for her and builds a long term barrier, leading to Lucie not feeling that she could talk to her mum and ask those questions. The longer she left it, mum also made it more difficult to start the conversation too. It also meant Lucie had no idea about her cultural heritage either, which is important to her. Believing she was conceived by artificial insemination, she is more concerned about discovering her heritage than who her father actually was.

One thing that struck me after reading was the number of people impacted by the initial relationship and what happened after. They all lived with their own truth, how they perceived what happened, which is different for each of them…Lucie, her mum, her father and his family. And all of them had questions that the others could answer had they known about each other back then. Lots of parts are needed to complete the jigsaw, and some of the parts each of them have are from the wrong box.

Lucie’s search for answers meant other people also having to look back and finally reveal family secrets to their loved ones.

I also loved that Lucie used her art work to explore who she is and to show the world.

Thanks to Neem Tree Press and @The_WriteReads for an advance copy for the purposes of this review for the blog tour.